Saturday, October 01, 2016

Situation In Syria Is Now Beyond Critical

You would have to have been living on another planet to fail to have noticed that while we have been away having our annual jolly in Majorca, the situation in Syria has deteriorated swiftly after the breakdown of a ceasefire agreed by the USA and Russia which lasted barely a week. All sides involved in the conflict blamed each other for breaking the ceasefire from day one but it was clear all bets were off when U.S. forces bombed Syrian government forces, killing at least 62.

CNN reported:

Hours after US-led coalition airstrikes reportedly killed dozens of Syrian troops, the US and Russian ambassadors to the United Nations chastised each other outside an emergency Security Council meeting.

The strike occurred Saturday in an eastern part of Syria that is not a part of a delicate and nearly week-old ceasefire. The US military said it was targeting ISIS militants and if it hit Syrian troops, it was an accident.

Russia and Syria said the strikes prove Washington and its allies are sympathetic to ISIS.

The Russian military said 62 Syrian soldiers were killed near Deir Ezzor Airport, according to state media. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll at 83 and said at least 120 soldiers were wounded.

After this, Syrian government forces launched an attack on the city of Aleppo, in which the last hospital still operating in the rebel held sector of the city was hit, prompting outrage from US officials.

Obama administration officials have begun considering tougher responses to the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on Aleppo, including military options, as rising tensions with Moscow diminish hopes for diplomatic solutions from the Middle East to Ukraine and cyberspace, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

The new discussions were being held at “staff level,” and have yet to produce any recommendations to President Barack Obama, who has resisted ordering military action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s multisided civil war.

But the deliberations coincide with Secretary of State John Kerry threatening to halt diplomacy with Russia on Syria and holding Moscow responsible for dropping incendiary bombs on rebel areas of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. It was the stiffest U.S. warning to the Russians since the Sept. 19 collapse of a truce they jointly brokered.

But the heavy use of Russian airpower in Syria has compounded U.S. distrust of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical intentions, not only in the 5-1/2 year civil war, but also in the Ukraine conflict and in what U.S. officials say are Russian-backed cyber attacks on U.S. political targets.

The U.S. officials said the failure of diplomacy in Syria has left the Obama administration no choice but to consider alternatives, most of which involve some use of force and have been examined before but held in abeyance.

These include allowing Gulf allies to supply rebels with more sophisticated weaponry, something considered more likely despite Washington’s opposition to this until now. Another is a U.S. air strike on an Assad air base, viewed as less likely because of the potential for causing Russian casualties, the officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

And now we have the latest escalation as Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov openly accuses the USA of aiding and supporting Al Nusra, thus indicating Russia's belief that the Obama Administration has no interest in neutralising the terrorists of ISIS and is only concerned with overthrowing the Assad regime in Damascus.

If the US launches a military campaign to oust the Syrian government, it would further fracture the country and have tremendous negative long-term consequence for the entire region, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova warned.

"If the US launches a direct aggression against Damascus and the Syrian Army, it would cause a terrible, tectonic shift not only in the country, but in the entire region," Zakharova said during a talk show broadcast Saturday 1 October.

With no government in Damascus, there will be a power vacuum in Syria, which Obama's notorious moderate rebels (the head amputators and human organ noshers of Sunni Muslim extremist cults who only (very moderately it must be said) torture and murder Christians, Jews and people who are simply the wrong sort of Muslim or even the right sort but just not extreme enough. In reality this rag bag army of nutters, criminals and fanatics are not moderate at all but terrorists of all flavors. Should Assad be removed as the USA wishes, these headcases would fill the vacuum in exactly the same way as they have in Libya which under Gadaffi was Africa's most prosperous and socially advanced nation and is now a failed state. There is no way dealing reasonably with such people.

A similar thing happened in Iraq, where [Saddam Hussein’s] Iraqi Army became the basis of the Islamic State. Everything that both the [US-led] coalition and Russia are fighting now stems from that particular foreign policy cock up, Zakharova said.

Now as the fighting escalates once more, the US says Moscow did not do enough to win the trust of rebel forces and to prevent the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad from attacking his opponents. Russia says Washington invented the ‘moderate rebels’ myth to give a veneer of respectability to its attempt to effect regime change in Syria, putting in place a puppet regime that would serve US and Saudi Arabian political and economic interests.

If full fledged war breaks out with Russia, it’s very likely to begin in Syria. The only good news here is I doubt Obama will begin any major escalation with only a few months left in his Presidency.The bad news is that if Hillary Clinton is elected President, all hell is likely to break loose in short order.

This blog and our other publications have been saying ever since the 'Arab Spring' was stirred up by a stupid, demogogical speech made in Cairo by Obama, that the US aim was a proxy war with Russia and Iran in the middle east. Look what happened since then. Secular Muslim leaders in Egypt and Libya were overthrown by US led regime change campaigns ...

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As Russian successes stack up in the middle east war against Islamic State guerillas in Syria, and the half hearted efforts of the FUKUS axis (France, UK, USA) look increasingly inept, we suggest that the western allies were never really interested in defeating ISIS, destabilisation of the entire region was their aim, so the thrust of their intervention was to overthow Assad rather than defeat the terrorists.

All Bombs Kill But Obama Only Denounces Russia's And Syria's Bombs The U.S. government has dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on Iraq alone in the last dozen years – and even hailed the start of the bombing campaign in 2003 as “shock and awe” – but now has coyly and repeatedly decried the Syrian government’s supposed use of crude “barrel bombs.”

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France ready to bomb Syria 'in self-defense' – foreign minister
France's Francois Hollande has been almost as desperate as Barack Obama for a war that will distract French voters from the economic disaster his socialist government has wrought. But if Russia continues to back Assad and there is no reason to think they will not, any allied effort to bring down assad is a non starter.

Russia Warns Washington Of "Unintended Incidents" In Syria
Yesterday, Thursday evening our news feeds picked up the latest development in the soap opera that is the Obama administrations waggering effor to make Russia back down from is's stance of supporting Assad and let the rent - boy President satisfy his bloodlust in bringing Syria’s horrific civil war with bombs and drone strike on Syrian civilians

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Is Russian Army Beginning to Engage in Syria
Those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear (h/t some bloke called Jesus) have know of the involvement of US troops in Syria for a considerable time. Given that the American military are active in over a hundred nations around the world, Washington's meddling in the domestic politics of soveeign nations comes as no surprise. It is more disturbing to learn that Russian troops are getting involved in Syria, to support Assad in his struggle against American - backed revolutionaries ...

While we watch Unkraine and Turkey The War Goes On In Syria
With mainstream media focused on ISIS and Ukraine amid, fears of an excalation of local problems into a war between East, West and Islam, we are in danger of forgetting nasty little civil conflicts like the one between forces loyal to the secular dictator Assad and the Al Nusra rebels who want to replace a secular dictatorship with an even more ruthless theocracy.

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Russia’s president Putin has become more harsh in his criticisms of US foreign policy over the past few years, from the moment France, the UK and USA used the excuse of staging a 'humanitarian mission to prevent genocide in Libya' to wage a bombing campain on that country with the aim of bringing down the Gaddafi regime, relations between the western powers and the Russia / China alliance have been going downhill fast ...

American Department of Defence Admits Supporting ISIS In Syria
Rumours have been rife for almost a year that ISIS/ISIL/ whatever you want to call them, the Islamist rebel group who have taken control of large areas of Syria and Iraq with the intention of setting up a new Islamic Caliphate, were actually set up by United Staes CIA agents with the aim of overthrowing secular Muslim dictators and helping the US ally Saudi Arabia impose theocratic rule throughout the Arab lands. A new leak proves that once again the 'conspiracy theorists' were right.